Hey guys, this is Heather from healthyveganrecipes.net. If you’re wondering where I am, Phil and
I are at his parent’s place for a few weeks. I am not in the kitchen today but I’m going
to show you my tahini salad dressing recipe.
If you wan to skip ahead to the tahini salad dressing recipe, you can head over to healthyveganrecipes.net.
What I wan tot talk about today in terms of this recipes is the fact that fats have a
lot of confusions around them regarding their nutritional value. You often hear me say that
I try to cook with no oil or minimal oil – that’s a totally separate topic from fats.
Now, I would classify fats as any type of food with high fat content. The healthy sources
of fats that I’m usually talking about them are nuts, seeds, avocados and maybe some olives.
Oils on the other hand, are just pure fat. There aren’t any other nutrient in there,
its just fats like olive oil and sunflower oil, which is 100% fat. But, we can use whole
foods to get a more balanced way of eating fats, and also make sure that those fats remain
fresh because fats can get rancid easily, the term that means that their chemical structure
breaks down, which can form into toxins.
Whole foods are always a better source of fat than oils. But when I say that I want
to minimize the use oil, I don’t mean to minimize the use of fat, because fat is a
very important part of your diet and you need some every day.
What I want to get across is you use whole food forms and not oils that would be much
better. So in a salad dressing, rather than oil – I showed you a few salad dressings
recently using pureed avocado and sunflower seed.
I’m going to show you today is the tahini salad dressing, which use a base of sesame
seeds butter. You can use nut butter, but tahini has a better, mild taste and it’s
less allergenic than other nut butters. You can also substitute sunflower seed butter
- a great one to use.
I’m going to make the salad dressing in a jar, and I’m going to make enough that
would last me for a few days. So, I’ve have some apple cider vinegar in a jar hear, which
is one of my favorite vinegars to use. It has a fairly neutral flavor – bordering
a little bit on the sweet side.
The main benefit of apple cider vinegar is that it doesn’t acidify your body like other
vinegars like white and balsamic vinegars that cause acid in your body.
So, here is my tahini, and I’m just going to put that in there – yes this is a lot
because I’m making a whole bunch of dressing. Many people when making salad dressings, they’re
basing their dressing on oil and vinegar.
If they use tahini – I’ve seen a lot of recipes where they use tahini and add some
more oil. The tahini is actually the fat portion of our dressing and we don’t need any additional
fats here, we’re just using tahini.
The fun thing about fats and vinegars is that when you stir them enough, they emulsify,
meaning they cream together. If we stir this enough, its actually going to make a very
different texture than it is right now, which is still fairly liquid right now.
But, if I’ll just keep stirring it, it’s going to get solid again – as you can see
its going to get thinker and thicker, which is too thick enough for a salad dressing.
I’m going to add some water to thin it out a bit because I don’t want a salad dressing
that thick, which will also tone down the flavor of the vinegar.
So, I added some
water and I got a more salad dressing type texture. Now, what is left to do is season
with some Indian spices, but you can add whatever you like. I’m also adding some powdered
ginger – fresh ginger is excellent as well.
You can flavor this dressing anyway you like. One of my favorite is to add some dill – nutritional
yeast with dill is an excellent combo. I finished it off with some cumin, some coriander, and
soy sauce instead of salt with a little bit of toasted sesame oil, for flavor.
Give that a stir and I got a jar full of salad dressing to put on my salad for lunch today.
I’m putting it on some leaf lettuce and I cooked some lentils that I soaked and sprouted
a couple of days ago. I cooked the lentils and put some broccoli at the end to steam
them a bit.
I seasoned the greens with a little bit of tamari and some Indian spices as well. I also
have some tomato and cucumber to top it off and of course my tahini salad dressing recipe.
If you want to learn more about fats, oils, and everything related to nutrition, you can
visit my website: healthyeatingstartshere.com. I will also post this tahini salad dressing
recipe at healthyveganrecipes.net.